The 5th Dragon is not your everyday reality program. For one thing, the mudslinging is real and the dirt really does fly. Produced by State of Mind Productions, The 5th Dragon follows the AMA Chevy Trucks Outdoor Motocross National Championships over the course of 12 races in 16 weeks. The origin of the show’s name is Japan, whose people refer to the four major motorcycle manufacturers, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha, as the “four dragons.” Each of the four sponsors a team, but a fifth group, independent and privately sponsored, has won championships for the past five years and has come to be known as the “fifth dragon.”
The Front End
“This is a tough environment,” said Michael Bryant, producer of The 5th Dragon and a motocross champion and veteran shooter of bike races. “It’s tough on lens gears and servos, and after 14 weeks of mud, dust, and dirt, there’s been zero problems. The lenses are fast and accurate with an incredibly clean look.”
The lenses Bryant refers to are the Canon J11ax4.5B lens, two J17ex7.7B lenses, and a J22ex7.6B lens. They help capture the race-day action and behind-the-scenes drama of motocross. And yes, Bryant is using clear protective filters...most of the time.
Due to the extremely tough conditions under which the riders, mechanics, managers, and owners of the Yamaha of Troy motocross team are shot in their quest for a win, lens durability is a must. “There’s a lot of dust in the air,” said Bryant. “You need to have really good, well-sealed, robust servos in your zoom lenses to keep things rolling smoothly, and the Canon lenses have always worked very well. We just clean them off and they keep providing crisp images and smoothly running controls.”
The added controls of the new Canon e-series lenses, which stands for both “enhanced” Digital Drive control functions and “ecological” design, have also helped Bryant get consistent results from multiple cameramen, an invaluable asset for shooting in the field. “With the e-series, you can set a particular operational style for coverage,” Bryant explained. “I go through the course and do my own shots in my style, the way I frame it, and pull out on the lens. We can input that exact pullout, so another operator can later take that lens and camera without worrying—once they frame the shot, the lens will do the move for them, and they can shoot much more like I shoot to keep continuity between operators.”
The Back End
The Canon lenses are being used with Sony’s PDW530 XDCAM optical disk camcorders. “The image quality on the Sony XDCAM is superb—it’s SD, but as close to HD as I’ve ever seen...on widescreen plasmas; everyone thinks it’s HD,” said Bryant, which is a credit to both the lenses and the 50Mbps XDCAM recording.
“There are no tape transports or magnetic tape to get clogged up with XDCAM and we’ve been looking forward to operations free of those technical problems,” said Bryant.
One of the biggest benefits of the PDW-530 for Bryant is the built-in buffer. “If we heard a sound bite that we want to use, and we weren’t already recording, we’d be covered for the eight seconds before we actually hit the button. So we may not necessarily be framed up on a shot but we at least have the lead-in sound bite. With a tape camera, you maybe have a three- to five-second lag before it actually lays the tape, so often we’ll have to go into post production and record voiceovers to bring you in to the end of the sound bite because you missed the beginning.”
Once content is acquired, the XDCAM camcorder’s ability to simultaneously generate frame-accurate, low-resolution proxy versions of high resolution content will help Bryant’s team as they travel from race to race, editing along the way.
“The proxy is invaluable because we’re doing a lot of traveling and I’ll be cutting on a laptop,” he said. “The ability to work with a low-resolution copy and then go back, auto-assemble and sync up with the high-res content on an Avid Symphony is phenomenal.
“XDCAM has an enormous impact on workflow. I can send proxies over the Internet to the office for transcribing while I’m in the field. I get back to the office and I’ve got my logs and transcriptions.”
The big benefit of XDCAM in post is the time savings as compared to tape. “Tape timecode is great, but [random access] clips are so much faster,” said Bryant. “We don’t spend so much time shuttling tapes, even if we knew where on the tape a shot was. Being able to pull up clips instantly has been an enormous help. All I have to do is run my finger down a log and find the clip.”
